


This American Life

by ohheichoumyheichou



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: 1940s era in Germany and the US, Alternate Universe - World War II, Holocaust, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-09
Updated: 2015-12-13
Packaged: 2018-03-17 02:03:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3511115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohheichoumyheichou/pseuds/ohheichoumyheichou
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Erwin Smith is an American GI who encounters and helps a concentration camp survivor during a liberation effort. Years later, the survivor comes to visit and thank him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: Please note that the contents of this fic are about a time period and setting that hold a lot of emotional baggage for many people. None of this was written to disrespect history, and some research has been done to try to be as factual as possible, but there are inevitable historical inaccuracies and general themes that might be offensive. Any time you have sexual content anywhere near the vicinity of the Holocaust, you are condemned to teeter dangerously close to trash. Proceed reading with caution.
> 
> I should probably note that this fic was first written in a different iteration for a rather obscure pairing, but fits the Erwin/Levi pairing uncannily well and has been rewritten to fit them. I've been dying for a WWII AU involving these two, and haven't come across any that satisfied me. Here is my attempt at it.

Erwin pulls into Atlantic Ave and sees Levi standing on the platform with his cleaning supplies and a bag of groceries, and it's as if all the day's troubles lift away. Levi usually gets home before him and greets him with dinner, but Erwin gets out earlier on Saturday and Levi always joins him on the last train of his shift, either at Union Square at 4:16 or Atlantic Avenue 4:37, depending on whether he was working the lower East side or Brooklyn that afternoon.

Erwin pulls on the cord hard to thrust open the doors. He couldn't do the police work he'd hoped to do after returning from the army, but operating a Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit train is also pretty hard to do with only one good arm. Erwin doesn't complain about that-- he's grateful for the opportunity to get exercise on the job. It's the lack of sunlight that still depresses him sometimes, and he relishes each and every time the yellow train passes over the bridge between the boroughs.

Levi climbs on, arranging the pail and mop near his seat and clutching the paper bag on his knees.

“What did you get?” Erwin asks, briefly allowing himself a conversation because people are slow to get on the train in the back. Levi smiles.

“Dinner,” Levi tells him ingenuously. His English is still not fluent, and Erwin thinks that maybe he should be helping him learn it faster somehow, though he doesn't know the first thing about acquiring another language. When he was in France and Germany he stayed with with the American GIs all the time, and he can't imagine what it's like to be isolated in a foreign speaking country.

“Oh, you ask what I was buying...?” Levi asks, but people shove into the line of view between them, all eager to get home, and Erwin works the doors and pushes the train onward. They finally arrive at Sheephead's Bay, where Erwin gets relieved and he reaches for Levi and helps him carry the groceries, wishing to God his right arm were functional enough to wrap around Levi as they walk to Erwin’s apartment through the seedy neighborhood. Then again, it's still not entirely clear to Erwin what their arrangement is. Levi seems to have all but permanently moved in, and never spends the night at his uncle's anymore, cooks their food, eats with Erwin, sleeps with Erwin, albeit across the room on the small couch, and works long hours cleaning rich people's houses for miserable wages that he spends almost entirely on buying them groceries. Erwin doesn't have objections per se, and he prefers it to the loneliness of coming back to the States a lamed veteran and having his older fiancee abandon him, but lately he's been wishing he could hang his hopes on something concrete.

Forcing the issue is the last thing Erwin wants to do with someone like Levi, however, so they continue to live together, oddly side by side. Erwin wonders if perhaps he's completely mistaken about Levi’s reasons for staying with him. Maybe he just detested living with his relative.

He will never forget the day he answered the door and found Levi standing there. He looked so different than he had in Europe that Erwin even doubted for a second that it was really him. Levi told him he was also living in Brooklyn with his uncle. He read his thanks off of a long note he had evidently prepared in advance but did not run by anybody (“It is good to see you after years. I never thank you very much for the kindness. In Germany, I was terrorized and did not think about how you did for me. Any day is the possibility and I thank you for my life... “). Erwin wondered how many times he may have dropped by his building not catching him at home, since Erwin’s work schedule is irregular. Levi had been so immersed in laboring through the note that he didn't immediately notice the way Erwin’s right arm hung limply at his side until he finished and Erwin gave him a one-armed embrace. Seeing Erwin’s arm withered from disuse, Levi became distressed, mumbling things in German, and nearly crying, and Erwin was touched by this reaction-- no American had cried on his behalf. Marie officially left him several days after his return, his mother had grieved in strange silence-- as if coming to terms before even seeing him-- and his father had berated him for having been careless, as if he had been storing up the speech ever since they got notice that their son had been injured. Erwin didn't argue back that it was a surprise attack on their unit by two snipers, from behind, as they forged on through German country at a quick, reckless clip, on their way to head off the eastern Allied armies that were by then almost as much foe as the collapsing Axis. He didn't argue that the medic extracted the bullet so sloppily that Erwin began to lose feeling in his arm only days later when scar tissue began to take over the entire area. There had been nothing for Erwin in Florida, and he came to New York, motivated to do public service even if it was just operating a subway train instead of the police work he had dreamed about.

Erwin invited Levi in that day, and served him coffee. Levi initially just sat on the couch in shock, nursing the mug on his knees, staring at Erwin’s arm and digesting this news, but soon he leaped to his feet, torturing English words out. “You... alone?”

Erwin had to answer in the affirmative.

“I cook for you. I work cleaning, and I clean for you!”

Erwin told him it was wholly unnecessary but Levi either didn't understand or didn't want to, and promptly went out and shopped for supper, infused with a busy energy Erwin never got to the chance to witness in Europe.

“What's your name anyway?” Erwin asked after he had finished the strange beet soup first course and Levi swooped in to take his bowl away.

Levi blinked at him several times, working hard to understand the simplest questions. “Luitgard Ackermann. I say to them Ackermann, they write “Acreman”. I say “Luitgard”, they say no, not… American name. I say Levi, juden name, they say okay, Lee-Vai.”

“That's not too bad for Ellis. Sounds similar at least,” Erwin said, and then quickly added “the same” when he saw Levi cock his head with a pained expression that Erwin was beginning to recognize as effort to understand.

“Not the same.”

“I like Levi. It sounds good,” Erwin said winking, sure that Levi wouldn't understand, but Levi looked deep in thought.

“Yes? Then if I decide calling you 'Eerwan'?” he finally offered, and erupted into a weak high-pitched laugh. They both continued to laugh, which was much easier than talking in that broken way.

Finally they stopped and sat in silence. Erwin watched Levi fidget and lick his lips, not daring to sit comfortably. “You must be hilarious, but I just don't know it. Wish I could understand you better.”

Levi stared at him and nodded tentatively, picking out some of the words.

Levi began to come by at least once a day after that, often twice, in the morning and evening, rearranging the entire kitchen to his liking, visit by visit. His cooking repertoire was by no means varied, and it wasn't exactly food that Erwin was used to, but he came to like cheese blintzes and stuffed cabbage, and tolerate the rest. Better yet was watching Levi savor food, his body swelling up, and making it even harder for Erwin to ignore him as a sexual entity moving about his cramped apartment.

“You have the key?” Levi asks when they pause in front of the apartment building, and Erwin sets down the groceries to dig around in his pocket. He wonders if he should just have a second one made for his all-but-official roommate.

“Tsk, _Er_ -win!” Levi says, leaning down for the bag. “Dogs are pissing here.”

“I doubt they piss right here,” Erwin says.

“Yes, yes, they piss, I see it. And then you are taking the bag and putting it on the table, and then the house is dirty and your clothes are dirty...”

Levi keeps speaking with animation as they mount the stairs, and Erwin silently wonders if Levi’s violent preoccupation with dirt developed before or after he first met him.


	2. Chapter 2

The first time Erwin saw Levi, the army was in the process of driving liberated prisoners from Buchenwald by the truckloads to the medical facilities camp set up a few miles distance at Ohrdruf. Erwin was in the back of the truck, already full, even though many people were still reaching up their emaciated arms begging to be taken away. “There will be another truck soon!” the other soldier in the back of the truck was shouting at them, all but pushing them away, prying their fingers off the vehicle. Erwin kept staring at one of them, who looked really striking, but also had horrible syphilitic sores on his lips and on the palms of his hands. Just as the truck shook to life, the man slouched meekly, releasing his grip on the truck, and was about to retreat, when Erwin stood up and lifted him off the ground into the truck bed by the armpits. Levi had been so frighteningly light then-- it was as if touching and lifting these people up made Erwin understand their plight much better than simply looking at them. He seated Levi in his own spot, pulling himself up to sit precariously on the edge just as the truck began driving away.

“Smith, we were already over-full,” Sergeant Dawk grumbled at Erwin, his face full of tired disgust as he watched Levi huddle between Erwin’s knees.

“Sorry,” Erwin muttered. “I just thought, this guy probably missed so many trucks by now. They don't ever take anyone who looks like that.”

“Maybe with good cause. I wouldn't touch him if I were you,” Dawk muttered, looking away toward the road ahead of them. “Can't believe some of them had time to get fuckin' syphilis. You think they'd be too worried about other things.”

Erwin had nothing to say. He didn't know why someone from a death camp like that could have syphilis, but he was inexplicably drawn to help those who looked like they needed it most, and it was his only way to deal with the tragedy of what he'd been seeing the whole day. He watched Levi sitting on the truck bed, his skinny frame bumping into Erwin’s army boots and legs from time to time, staring up at him once in a while with sad eyes, then quickly looking down again, as if remembering that his mouth was disfigured with sores.

When they arrived, Erwin helped everyone off the truck and wanted badly to stay and help Levi obtain the penicillin he needed, but there was no time and they had to make at least one more round before it would start to get dark. Levi stood staring after them, and Erwin had no faith that he would ever locate him again. He waved, for lack of being able to do anything else. Levi didn't even return the wave, but kept staring after them. Erwin’s truck made two more roundtrips before retiring for the evening, and Erwin went looking for Levi. He found him somehow, miraculously, huddled next to the hot stove in one of the nurses' stations. It was April and the ground was damp, and it was extremely cold at night. He had a US Army-labeled tarp around his body, and was obviously not being treated.

“That's a lost cause if I ever saw one,” one of the younger nurses told Erwin when he tried to get Levi attention. Finally, Erwin decided to take matters into his own hands. He searched out a doctor willing to sell him penicillin for non-military use, and it took most of his free cash to buy it and pay for the doctor's time. Levi became nervous at the sight of the needle the doctor unpacked and was disinfecting, and the doctor had real trouble finding a spot with enough flesh to inject. Erwin held Levi still and turned away while the doctor made several attempts to find muscle in his backside. That was the first embrace Erwin got from Levi, however frantic and bony, and the first time he felt a glimmer of sexual desire that seemed wholly inappropriate, but Erwin did not suppress it and held Levi tenderly after the injection was over and the doctor rushed off somewhere else. He stroked Levi’s bony back for a long time, until it stopped heaving with frightened breaths.

“Does it hurt?” Erwin asked when Levi finally let go. Levi only shook his head sadly, but Erwin suspected it was just to indicate that he didn't understand English. Erwin had very little money left over, so he had to flirt with a nurse to get her to find Levi a real blanket and a bowl of the thin soup they were trying to use to slowly bring the refugees back, after learning the hard way that starved people die from sudden overnutrition in previous rescue efforts in other camps. Erwin sat and watched Levi eat the soup in a great rush, licking the plate clean, then looking a bit remorseful and embarrassed under Erwin’s gaze. Erwin himself had hardly eaten all day and he was beginning to feel weak from it, so he had to part from his friend and join the rest of the soldiers, already eating dinner.

When Erwin found Levi easily again the next day he began to suspect it was destiny that kept bringing them together in this busy milling outpost full of death and suffering. He had just eaten one of the little Hershey bars the army issued to its soldiers and he hoped he didn't smell of it. Levi greeted him a bit more warmly this time, his usually downturned mouth suddenly spreading into an almost-smile of recognition.

“Thank you,” he said with a strange accent, practically in German, but still understandable. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

“You're welcome, friend,” Erwin said, resisting the urge to pick him and carry him to wherever it is he wanted to go on those flimsy legs. Erwin’s unit was not going to move forward until noon, and he decided to spend the last few hours helping at the nurse's station. Many of the people they brought over seemed to be dying, as if having made it across this finish line was now depriving them of the ability to go on living. Levi dawdled around in Erwin’s vicinity, kicking at the dirt idly, and Erwin was glad he seemed to be thriving despite very little treatment. Part of Erwin wanted to just go off somewhere with him and sit quietly, maybe embrace him again, but it was pointless and wrong of him to do that, he knew, and Erwin continued helping carry in water and carry waste out of the camp.

A translator came by to interview the refugees and intercepted Levi to get an account from him, and for this Erwin did leave his post to listen in. Levi got agitated and Erwin just stood still, passively absorbing the sound of his voice talking so rapidly in German into the recorder, understanding not a thing.

“What did he tell you?” Erwin asked in spite of himself, just when the translator had packed up his transcription pad.

“I don't know, a lot of them don't make much sense. But you don't really need to understand them to see they've been treated worse than shit.”

Just before Erwin left, he jotted his name and his parents' Florida address on a piece of paper and handed it to Levi, who looked at it without betraying any emotion.

“If you ever come to America...”

Levi looked at him with a sort of pain in his face, finally shaking his head, pointing back and forth between Erwin and his ear. “No Englisch,” he said, sounding frustrated with himself.

“Yeah, you're alright. Glad you're alive,” Erwin said the last part pointing at the corners of his smile and then putting his hands on Levi’s horribly bony shoulders, but Levi looked at him with something like panic. It was all Erwin could do for him. He embraced Levi one last time, patted his cheek affectionately, gesturing that he hoped his sores would clear up, and waved good bye.

~~~

Levi watches Erwin flopped on the couch as he chops up onion for the soup-- partly to avoid getting the juice in his eyes, partly because he likes to look at Erwin, especially when Erwin is not looking back at him and making him feel vulnerable. Levi’s workday was hard, scrubbing the floor of people's homes, and picking up after their unruly children always physically tiring, but his spirits are always lifted by the easy access to good food, and making dinner for Erwin is the highlight of his day. He's lucky he has an uncle who may not be rich but has rich acquaintances and can vouch for his integrity. Jews help Jews out, and Levi has been able to find work on a regular basis even though he's been cleaning only Jewish homes. He isn't even bitter about the menial labor, because he's still overwhelmed by how lucky he was to get in under immigration quotas. And it isn't as if his accounting job in Germany prior to being placed in the ghetto was particularly fulfilling. There are Jews in Brooklyn, and Italians and Irishmen he's sure too, who had good standing in language-based occupations back in Europe, but here they are reduced to the worst of jobs because of lack of fluency, trust, or both. Levi doesn't really feel such a loss, even though perhaps he should.

Maybe it's because he lives with Erwin. It gives him a sense of purpose and fulfillment and being needed, even though Erwin obviously fended for himself well enough before Levi finally found him using an army registry. It's bewildering to play caretaker for someone like Erwin... Levi will always remember how the Americans rolled into the camp on their big trucks, and how incredibly sunny that day was-- as if the Americans had imported the weather with them. And Erwin had been the sunniest of all-- he seemed to epitomize everything about America-- tall, strong, sunny, healthy, devastatingly handsome, and even though those days are filled with unpleasant memories, Erwin alone somehow counterbalances all the pain... standing on that truck like a kind demigod, pulling people up and Levi, who had already given up on being treated, suddenly having the spirit to fight his way to the truck, knowing that he had to take this opportunity to get on-- now or never.

He didn't even realize the magnitude of Erwin’s generosity back then-- not understanding what he was being injected with until days later, when all his symptoms began to miraculously subside. He had never heard of a cure for syphilis, and only slowly did it dawn on him how much it had probably cost Erwin. He turned Erwin’s terse note over and over in his hands many times every day, treating it like some charm and wearing it out, reading Erwin’s first name incorrectly for weeks before a fellow refugee fluent in English taught him to say it right. An American address had given him hope, too, and suddenly he knew that, just like near the truck, he had to work and persevere and get himself into the US and then good things would come to him. He spent more than a year practically homeless, and at one point almost moved to Palestine. His wife and daughter and most of the people he knew were dead, but somehow the pain he had been through numbed him to the sadness he should have felt in the aftermath. Part of him had already suspected that if he made it out alive he would be alone. He lived with other lost people in overcrowded apartments in Holland until his petition was accepted by the INS, largely helped by an uncle who was already an American citizen and promised to take him in and help him start his life over again.

Before moving to America, Levi thought Florida might be close enough to travel to, to pay his respects in person. He opted to write a letter once he knew better, but when he verified the address with the Army office they informed him that Pvt. Smith was in fact receiving his army pension check at a Brooklyn address, not half an hour walk from where Levi was staying with his uncle. How terrifying it had been to see that the person who had been so perfect had lost the use of an arm in combat after the tide had already turned-- as though an angel had had his wings clipped in the ugly, petty crossfire of human affairs. Levi has been trying to rehabilitate his arm, but both of them knew it might be a lost cause.

Levi cuts up beets and potatoes and dumps them into boiling water and takes a short break, sitting down next to Erwin.

“I need new clothings,” Levi says, looking down at the way his pants are cutting into his waist. He only has two pairs, both of them given to him as charity back in Holland, along with his grey sweater that he has to wear indoors in the winter because Erwin’s apartment never gets consistent heat.

“It's all the good food you make for us,” Erwin says, laughing, poking him in the side gently. Levi stiffens, always getting nervous when Erwin touches him. As admiring as he is of Erwin, Erwin also stands for everything foreign. In fact, it doesn't escape Levi’s notice that Erwin’s general look is a bit reminiscent of the very people he despised and feared in the camps. Erwin even has a German aunt who visited him-- apparently the only relative living close by-- and she talked to Levi in slightly formal German with a first generation American accent. Something about America is magical... how it takes all sorts of people entrenched in ancient lines of descent and mixes them all up, makes them unrecognizable in the span of one generation. Erwin is somehow the epitome of this-- still looking like his European ancestors, but graced with a bewildering kindness and optimism that Levi had never encountered in Germany, even before the war began.

“I'm just kidding, you look real healthy.” Erwin leans away, always sensing Levi’s discomfort even when Levi thinks he doesn't really show it. He starts to unbutton his shirt with one hand and Levi moves closer again to do it for him. Levi has taken on more and more tasks around the house, not because Erwin is growing weaker, but because Levi has a strange need to be involved in Erwin’s routines. At first it was only signing things, or using scissors, but now he helps him dress and undress, tucks him into bed, packs his work lunch for him. He has to stop himself from trying to spoonfeed Erwin when he shows any hint of clumsiness in his left hand.

“You should wear it whole day,” Levi admonishes as Erwin takes off the lead weight that's supposed to balance his spine out.

“It chafes,” Erwin says, scratching at the place where it was fastened, and Levi nods less from agreement than just having understood a new word from context.

“Yes, but your back bends...” he says, frowning.

Levi has always slouched, and the camp only taught him to fold up even more, because being inconspicuous was often rewarded with escaping notice. But he finds it a crime that Erwin’s injury is continuing to affect his frame so long after the war, and he never wants to see him stooped over.

Levi massages Erwin’s entire arm for him on a nightly basis, and Erwin sometimes groans his pleasure when Levi does a particularly powerful job of it. He does so now, and Levi lingers on his tight shoulder for a while. Levi never liked his stubby hands, but now he's proud of having strong fingers.

“You worked hard today,” Levi says, wincing as he puts effort into the knots in Erwin’s back muscles. “Those doors. Why are they heavy.”

“So people don't fall out I guess,” Erwin says, shrugging, and Levi’s fingers slip a bit from the movement.

“Too many people in the subway. Fall them out,” Levi says, making a scoffing little sound, and Erwin laughs, and it's Levi’s favorite feeling, the exhilaration of making Erwin laugh. He wishes he were clever enough to do it all the time.

“You've got the perfect hands for this,” Erwin says after Levi finishes, and touches him lightly, but Levi quickly scampers into the kitchenette and puts on an apron and ties his hair back with a kerchief to keep it out of the soup.

“Your exercise,” Levi says, cocking a judgemental eyebrow. Erwin sighs and takes out the resistance band. He's stopped holding out hope that he'll ever recover sensation and control in his right arm some day, but Levi is grimly insistent about it lately.

“I need to buy carp tomorrow.” Levi puts his hands on his hips when he hears Erwin sighing. “Are you tired of my fish, Eer-wan?”

“No,” Erwin says and goes over to put on a Sinatra record. He hasn't bought a television set, or even a radio, but he does listen to music while they eat. “I just think it's funny how you people make a meatloaf out of fish.”

“Why it's funny?” Levi asks, tasting the soup and squeezing a lemon into it. “Tomorrow for breakfast, blintzes, Eer-wan?”

“Sounds good, Lovey,” Erwin says, chuckling, only daring to use the nickname he came up with when they are at home. He wonders if Levi puts up with it only because he doesn't realize Erwin really means it.

Erwin starts working his arm with a resistance band, still holding out hope it will recover sensation and control some day.

"Cheese blintzes, but we don't have sour cream."

“You're so cute when you're planning menus.”

“Food is important,” Levi counters, his head in the oven checking on the dough that's been rising in there since morning. Saturday night and Sunday are his big cooking days, but he's taken an inordinate, anxious interest in food ever since his experience in Europe. He takes the pot with the yeasty dough out, and startles when he feels Erwin’s body behind him. Erwin runs his good hand along Levi’s left arm and rubs his nose into Levi’s neck, nipping at it.

Levi’s heart is pounding a mile a minute, but he twists out of Erwin’s embrace. “Erwin, you're distracting.”

Erwin doesn't move away, kissing Levi’s ear in a way that makes him hard in an instant. Levi’s sexual appetite came back after he began eating well, but he always takes care to confine those activities to the shower, and he assumes Erwin does the same. Erwin’s large hand squeezing his backside gets him even more flustered.

“Erwin, you want to eat dinner, yes or no?” Levi says, his voice shaking, dropping a spatula when Erwin kneels down and rubs his face into Levi’s thigh.

“Yeah,” Erwin says but doesn't let up and Levi shivers and can't take it anymore, and slips away and runs across the room toward the door.

Erwin looks at him sadly. “Levi... I really don't understand you... Come back.”

Levi finds it impossible to leave but he's also compelled to stay away. He slowly shuffles back within arm's reach of Erwin but no closer, looking up at him in shame.

“Look, I'm lonely. You act like a wife to me day in and day out, until I touch you. And it's just hard.”

Levi is staring at the floor because he can't face Erwin. Even if he were fluent in English, he could never explain that all touching makes him think of is how he was periodically brought in from the barracks or his work station into the dingy little room where some of the SS guards used to use him against a table that gave him splinters on his sunken in stomach. His hipbones used to get awful bruises from knocking into the wood-- not even because the young men were particularly rough, but because his bones were not protected by much flesh at all. Even the SS guards who claimed they weren't interested in men often watched the proceedings and never turned down a blowjob. He remembers the tall young head of personnel with the frightening, handsome face and the bad knees, who would sit back in a chair and make Levi move up and down, smiling at him, and this was worse, in a way, because it made Levi unquestionably complicit.

And then, when it became obvious he had contracted syphilis, Levi thought he would be spared any more humiliation, at the expense of his rapidly dwindling health, but some of the younger guards got together and made him kneel on the floor. He remembers that night most of all, for some reason, the German shepherd panting behind him, rutting into his lower back with frightening eagerness, and he did nothing, absolutely nothing to prevent it, because there were twenty or so men standing around watching the spectacle and laughing. That night was when something broke in Levi, he thinks, even though it was harmless. He prayed so hard that one of them would come over and end it, and wished he were tall and blond and blue-eyed and just like all of them, just so he would never have had to go through that. He is not a homosexual, he kept repeating to himself and it made life reasonable, if not bearable, until the Americans arrived and made him question everything all over again.

Seeing Erwin up on that truck, the sun practically behind him, streaming light from his head, and then sitting between his legs... Levi was ashamed that the first thought that came to his mind was how he would go about orally pleasing him-- that even this radiant American soldier was now part of the sordid perception of the world Levi had cultivated in the ghetto and camps.

Erwin looks at him with obvious disappointment in his eyes. “Levi, forget it. Let's just have dinner.”

Levi inhales sharply. “No, I don't forget. I don't forget many things. It's hard for me too.”

Erwin looks at him sadly.

Levi swallows. “You like men?”

“I like good people,” Erwin says calmly.

“If bad things happen to me, I am not good from this,” Levi says, red in the face.

“You're a good person, trust me. You helped when I was feeling very lonely.” Erwin licks his lips before the next part. “I love you. I loved you when I first saw you, and I love you more now.”

Levi looks at the floor. “I don't... I don't give you children. I don't let you bring a woman home, I know this... It's bad.”

“You don't love me back? That's fine, just say so.”

“I don't say I don't love you!” Levi says sharply, tears beginning to well up and run down his cheeks.

“What do you say?”

“I...” Levi is torn. “I don't know that you will be happy. With me.”

Erwin smiles sadly. “I am happy with you, already.”

Levi shakes his head. “I... I can't...” and shrugs his shoulders in his impotence to even say what he wants to say. “In bed, I can't.”

Erwin looks at him sadly and shrugs. “Okay then.”

They eat dinner without much talking, Sinatra and the Andrews Sisters filling in the silence. Levi keeps trying to string together the words for an apology, or a promise to try, but he just can't. There's something about Erwin that makes Levi feel safe-- so safe that he can't push himself to do something he's ambivalent about.

It's when they're lying in the dark, listening to each other breathe on opposite side of the room that Levi suddenly realizes that he's got to try harder, that his life has only been worth living since he began moving himself toward this Pvt. Smith-- in the truck, in the camp, in the maze of Brooklyn.


	3. Chapter 3

Erwin was almost asleep when he wakes up to the bed dipping. Levi clumsily crawls up to his face, his white nightshirt the only thing easy to see in the dark.

"Erwin, you are angry?"

"No, of course not."

"Erwin, I want to be with you always. I don't want you angry with me."

Erwin lets out a laugh. "I’m not angry, I told you. Sorry I frightened you. I shouldn't have."

"I'm not frightened," Levi whispers.

"No?" Erwin says, with a slight grunt as he heaves himself to his side and somehow Levi is practically under him, lying pale and stiff as a board as Erwin strokes his face. "Levi, you don't have to. You can stay as long as you like, it’s not like I’m batting women away, you know."

"Erwin..." Levi says after a bit of pained-looking thought. "You can find a good woman."

"So can you," Erwin says, and he kisses the tip of Levi’s nose and Levi doesn't flinch away-- as if the darkness makes everything more acceptable.

"I had a wife," Levi says sharply. Erwin’s heard mention of her before, but the next part floors him a bit. "And a baby girl."

Erwin blinks in the dark. "Levi, I'm sorry. But you can find another."

"I don't want another."

Erwin embraces him, inhaling Levi's soap-smelling hair. "Nobody should be lonely their whole life, Levi."

"I'm..." Levi searches for the word, then just knocks on his head.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"That mean I am... strange. In the head. It's ruined."

Erwin pushes Levi’s nightshirt up and Levi doesn't protest when Erwin nibbles on his bare, soft, white torso. There's something about the weight gain that happened right before Erwin’s eyes in the last few months that makes it particularly hard to keep a hands off policy. "What's wrong with your head."

Levi, whose entire body was still and stiff-- whom Erwin was prepared to just kiss and touch a bit, and maybe, just maybe jerk off if he wouldn't get too nervous-- suddenly springs into action instead of answering. He pulls Erwin’s underwear down his legs and discards it on the floor along with his own. Erwin watches wide-eyed, hardly believing what he can barely make out in the dark as Levi dips two fingers into his mouth and reaches back while leaning down and sucking Erwin's cock a few times to get it hard and wet before straddling and lowering himself down. The entire preparation takes less than a minute, and Erwin just gapes as Levi begins to rock up and down. He resists the urge to dig his head back into the pillow like he used to with Marie, because he feels like this is something to be witnessed without blinking.

"Levi, God..." Erwin blurts out just before he's finished. Levi wiggles up and down a few more times, then seems like he's about to get off as quickly as he got on, but Erwin battles his postorgasmic lethargy and pulls him down into an embrace, feeling Levi’s soft body land on his, breathing quickly.

"Levi, what..." Erwin tries to ask and can't even manage, still reeling. "Levi..."

Levi is silent, avoiding eye contact, breathing slowing down. They lie together, half of Erwin’s cock still embedded in Levi’s body. Levi again moves to get up, and this time Erwin sees that he's started crying.

"Levi, I don't understand..."

Levi shrugs, sniffing back tears.

Erwin gets up and embraces Levi back to lie in bed and kisses his face all over, tasting the salt on his cheeks.

"Levi, what is it," Erwin finally says, a hint of command in his voice.

"No," Levi answers quietly. "Nothing."

"Where did you... how did you learn that?" Erwin, in all honesty, hadn't even thought it was possible to so easily do that with only saliva. Even in his wildest dreams about their hypothetical happily ever after life together he only imagined fucking the space between Levi’s little thighs. This was exhilarating and frightening all at once.

"Erwin... how you think I live in Buchenwald. How you think I am so sick when you saw me."

Erwin doesn't say anything-- there's nothing to say. He holds Levi close, still kissing him on the head.

"Erwin, I'm dirty," Levi says, trying to push himself out of bed, but Erwin won't let him pull away now.

"Where, here?" he says and Levi’s back arches when Erwin’s hand strokes his hole, and Erwin’s lips kiss his forehead. "You're not dirty, stay in bed."

Levi’s heartbeat speeds up at Erwin’s tone, and he stays put. Erwin embraces him close until Levi’s body softens and he succumbs to sleep, leaning into Erwin’s chest.

Erwin wakes up to the sound of dishes and sizzling oil. He sits up, the sheet sliding off his naked body, the only sure sign that something out of their ordinary routine took place last night. He rubs his eyes and blinks at Levi milling around the kitchenette, the kerchief and apron back on, making blintzes just as he so self-importantly planned.

Levi looks up at him. "Is it loud? It's nine. Shouldn’t sleep so late anyway."

"Don't worry," Erwin says, yawning. He climbs out of bed and pulls his underwear back on but nothing else, strolling behind Levi and swiping a sip of milk from the glass bottle on the counter.

"Eerwan! Tsk."

"Lovey!"

Levi turns away from the stove top when the last few blintzes are browned on all sides, and Erwin looks down at him, kisses him to verify that it wasn't somehow all a dream. Levi makes no move to push away.

"Be my wife, Lovey," Erwin says, only half-joking, burrowing and kissing into the softness beneath Levi’s jaw.

"Okay," Levi mumbles, staring at the floor.

"Be my wife," Erwin repeats, getting a certain thrill from just saying that. He scoops Levi up in his arms and deposits him back in bed, lying down behind him, unbuttoning his pants, determined to see Levi reach climax this morning.

"Erwin, use the other," Levi says when Erwin starts to masturbate him with his left hand.

Erwin laughs and rolls them both over so his right hand is free. "You little nag."

"You said you want a wife?" Levi asks, the slightest smile showing up. Erwin had to kiss this elusive smile before it disappeared again. Erwin purses his lips impatiently with the effort of using his right hand, but Levi lies on his side patiently, his erection slowly but surely growing in Erwin’s blighted hand.

"Er-r-r-r...win… p-please…" Levi chokes on his name and arches his back desperately, and Erwin forges on with extra effort, kissing Levi’s shoulder blades and entwining his leg around Levi’s, wanting to envelop him entirely. He didn't dream of this life when he was a little boy growing up in Florida-- but for the first time since his dream was derailed by getting wounded, Erwin’s unequivocally happy with what life has thrown his way.

After Levi finishes he turns around and immediately starts paying back the favor with his hand.

"You don't have to--" Erwin starts to say but Levi shakes his head.

"What don't have to. I cook, I clean, I take care of your body if you want a wife. Right?"

"I know what I want-- do you want it? What do I do to make you happy?"

Levi thinks for a moment. "You make me happy because I feel safe. You make me happy because you are American-optimistic."

"American-optimistic?" Erwin chuckles.

"Yes. Big and loud and being happy about the future all the time."

"And you like that?"

"Yes," Levi says, resuming his grip on Erwin.

"I love you, Levi, I really do," Erwin says, words beginning to hitch.

"Yes," Levi replies, not looking up, eyes focused on his task, and Erwin knows that's as explicit a declaration as he's likely to get.


End file.
